


Presenting the Evidence

by patster223



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Fantasy High
Genre: Autistic Riz, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Riz, Spoilers for Bad Boy's Night, nonbinary gorgug, spoilers for sophomore year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27783301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patster223/pseuds/patster223
Summary: Riz realizes that they might be non-binary.Obviously, the only way to deal with this realization is to break into Gorgug’s room at 2am.
Comments: 40
Kudos: 112





	Presenting the Evidence

**Author's Note:**

> He/they Riz rights, baby.

By now, the Bad Kids are used to Riz breaking into their homes in the middle of the night. 

It’s not like Riz _means_ to make a habit of it. He’s not really one for casual breaking and entering, rogue abilities aside. But after the whole Baron incident, Riz can admit that his paranoia has...increased a bit. 

_Look,_ it’s only logical that if Riz makes a breakthrough in the middle of the night, he _has_ to let one of the others know in case he gets kidnapped again. He _has_ to let them know right away, or else he would have to wait until morning, and if he waits until morning then he has to spend the entire night covering the mirrors and reflective surfaces in his office, and maybe throw out all his coffee too since even a murky liquid can still kind of show a reflection—

Anyway. Everyone in the Bad Kids agrees that it’s for the best that Riz reach out with his revelations regardless of the hour. 

Gorgug is usually pretty low on Riz’s contact list for such occasions. Adaine is his first call, given her elven sleep schedule and enthusiasm for puzzles. Gorgug, while close by, has an incredibly regular sleep schedule, incredibly involved parents, and incredibly low interest in puzzles that involve more conspiracy boards than tinkering tools. 

But it’s Gorgug who Riz needs tonight.

“Gorgug,” Riz hisses, crawling through the window. “Gorgug, it’s me, Riz.” 

“Riz?” Gorgug mumbles from where they’re scrunched up on their bed. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Are _you_ hurt?” 

“Why would _I_ be hurt?”

“I don’t know? It just seemed...good to ask?” 

Riz drops onto the floor with barely a sound. Though, his rogue skills don’t make much of a difference as Gorgug gets up, the creaking and groaning of their bed echoing throughout the tree.

“Shh!” Riz hisses. “What if your parents hear?”

“It’s fine,” Gorgug yawns. They wipe the sand from their eyes and turn on their bedside lamp. “I think they already think you’re my secret boyfriend after the last time you snuck in? Oh, they wanted you to have this.”

Gorgug grabs a three-ring binder off their bedside table and hands it to Riz. It’s labeled _polyamory._

“I-I don’t want to date anyone, Gorgug,” Riz manages, gently placing the binder back on the table. “Let alone two people! No offense to you and Zelda.”

“Oh, none taken,” Gorgug says. “My dad, uh, still might try to give you condoms if he sees you, though. Hey, so, what’s up? Did you find a clue about the...N-I-G-H-T Y-O-R-B thing?” 

“No,” Riz sighs. “I don’t even know how to write notes about... _it_ without triggering the whole-“ he gestures to his chest where the tattoo still faintly glows “-invoking-the-name-of-an-eternal-darkness-monster thing.”

“Then what’s going on?” 

Riz hesitates. The thing is, he _wishes_ he were here to talk about their latest case. Cases have neat filing systems and cork boards with red string that you can rearrange. Not that Riz didn’t _try_ to make a cork board for this, but it quickly became so complicated that Riz had to create an entirely new color coding system for his red string, which is probably a sign that he shouldn’t even be bothering Gorgug about this, at least not until he can really figure out how to differentiate the burgundy string and the maroon string—

Riz jumps as Gorgug places a gentle hand on his shoulder. 

“You seem really wigged out. Should we get everyone together?” Gorgug asks, already reaching for their crystal with the hand not on Riz’s shoulder. It’s an awkward reach for Gorgug, and their tongue pokes out with the effort, but not once do they seem to consider moving the hand they have on Riz.

It’s the first time anyone has touched Riz this week, because he’s been hiding in his office a lot, because he feels weird and squirmy around people lately, because he doesn’t know how to act anymore, and suddenly Riz finds himself blurting out the thing he’s here to ask. 

“You’re non-binary.” 

Riz’s face instantly heats up as soon as he says it. He badly wants to chew on something to distract himself, but Gorgug’s bed posts are reinforced from the last time Riz came around and anxiety-gnawed on their bed. 

Gorgug, for their part, doesn’t seem offended, only grunts and does one final stretch to grab their crystal. Though, as soon as they have it, they toss it onto their bed, focusing instead on Riz. 

“Yeah? I am?” Gorgug says. 

“Cool! That’s...super cool.” Riz grits his teeth, both at himself for that asinine comment and because his teeth feel stupidly sharp right now. 

“Uh, do you want something to chew on?” Gorgug looks around, scratching their head. “I guess I don’t mind if you eat the bed—I’ve been thinking about making a new one anyway—but I was kind of hoping to sleep again tonight. I guess I could sleep on the floor, though.”

 _God,_ Gorgug is so nice. Riz almost wishes he’d gone to Fabian’s or something—if he were being yelled at right now, he wouldn’t feel so bad about bothering Gorgug.

“I won’t eat your bed,” Riz grits out.

“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind. But here,” Gorgug says, handing him a chewing stim toy that looks hand-made. 

Riz doesn’t put the toy in his mouth, just twists it in his hands and studies Gorgug out of the corner of his eye. By now, Gorgug looks fully awake, black eyes kind and aware as they study Riz in return, but they don’t seem especially impatient as Riz struggles to find his words. Instead, Gorgug reaches for some tinkering tools on their bedside table and begin to fiddle with them, taking their eyes off Riz long enough for him to get up the courage to speak again.

“How did you, uh, know?” Riz asks, claws digging into the toy in his hands. “That you were non-binary.”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Gorgug admits. “There wasn’t one moment, I guess. Meeting Garty made me think about it a lot. I’d never met a non-binary half-orc before, and they were really nice. And then there was boy’s night-”

“Oh god,” Riz says with a shudder, stuffing the toy in his mouth at the thought of boy’s night. 

Gorgug shudders too. “Yeah, Ragh talked to me afterward about how not all masculinity has to be like that, and I could express myself however I wanted? But after stealth mode I just wasn’t...feeling being a boy, I guess. I probably hadn’t for a while, but it took me until then to put it together. I’m not always the most observant guy. Person. You know what I mean.”

“I think you’re observant, Gorgug,” Riz mumbles around the toy. He suddenly feels bad for not dropping by Gorgug’s more often for help with his late night breakthroughs. It’s true that Gorgug isn’t much for conspiracy boards, but they’re perfectly willing to sit with something and mull it over until it finally makes sense to them. They don’t freak out over getting stuck like Riz is doing right now. 

Gorgug looks up from their tinkering and smiles. “Thanks, Riz. That means a lot."

Riz hops onto the bed besides Gorgug—and it truly is a hop to make it up to a Gorgug-sized bed. Riz’s feet dangle over the floor, and he feels himself relax just a bit with the comforting heat of Gorgug at his side. 

“So,” Gorgug says, placing their tools and their crystal back on their bedside table. “Do you think you’re non-binary?”

“Uhh, what makes you think that?” Riz says, spitting out the toy onto his lap. “Maybe I was just curious. I’m a curious guy...person...whatever?”

Gorgug raises an eyebrow. “A guy-person-whatever?”

“I don’t _know_ , okay?” Riz huffs. He feels himself tensing again, and he's starting to sweat even though he’s on Gorgug’s bed and is trying not to ruin it again. “Look, I tried to do all the right research, I stole your parents’ three-ring binder about gender—”

“ _When?_ ”

“And I made a board and everything!” Riz digs into his briefcase and pulls out a messy conspiracy board full of overlapping photos and tangled, knotted red string that barely makes sense even to him. It's truly some of his sloppiest work. He’s a shame to his profession and possibly his gender, if he still even has one. 

“Look!” Riz exclaims. “I made a whole gender investigation board; I even used _multiple_ shades of red string! But the problem is, I can barely tell the string apart—”

“You can’t tell these apart? Are you colorblind?”

“I might have discovered that I’m red-green colorblind during all this,” Riz admits. “Which was really distracting, because I was trying to have a completely different revelation. I can’t be colorblind _and_ non-binary, right?”

“Why not…?”

“Look at the board, Gorgug!” Riz says, pointing hard enough for a photo to fall off. He frantically tries to pin it back, but he’s forgotten which color string the photo belongs to. “The evidence doesn’t add up! Why am I only thinking about this _now_? I went through a whole sexuality crisis last year; surely _that_ would be the time to start questioning my gender. And another thing; if I’m non-binary, why do I feel okay with he/him pronouns but not with having a boy’s night? Am I not enough of a boy to do a _boy’s night?_ Is that it? I can do a crab night! A shrimp night! Does that just mean I’m a little crab? Is my gender a little crab? Am I just a little crab, Gorgug?!”

“I guess your gender...could be crab?” Gorgug says. They gingerly take Riz’s conspiracy board from him, wincing at how many crab photos there are on it. “I think you might just be non-binary, though.”

“That’s not what the evidence says, Gorgug! The evidence says I’m a tiny genderless crab!”

“You’re not even drunk, stop saying you’re a crab!” Gorgug yells, tearing the crab photos off of the conspiracy boards. 

“I’m a crab!” Riz cries, reaching for the board, squirming as Gorgug’s enormous hand pushes him back. “Admit it; I’m a colorblind crab!”

“You’re not a crab, you idiot! Crabs aren’t colorblind! And there isn’t any evidence for being non-binary, it’s just about how you feel!”

At the thought of evidence being useless in this endeavor—and of a fucking crab being able to see colors that he can’t—Riz fully begins to spiral and, being unable to bite the bedposts, begins biting the mattress.

“How am I supposed to know how I feel,” Riz says through a mouthful of Gorgug’s bed, which is now also covered in his sweat,” without evidence!” 

There’s a polite but firm knock on the door, and a moment later, Gorgug’s father dips his head into the room. His eyes widen upon seeing Gorgug’s panicked hovering and Riz with a corner of a mattress stuffed into his mouth. 

“Is everything okay, Gorgug…?” Digby asks. “Me and your mom heard a bit of a commotion in here! It’s fine if you’re going to have secret sleepovers with your friends or paramours or what-have-you, but just remember it’s not a big tree, okay, bud? Hey, Riz, how’s it going?”

“Hi, Mr. Thistlespring,” Riz says around the mattress in his mouth, wincing as his teeth catch on a metal spring.

“Everything is fine, Dad,” Gorgug sighs. “You know how Riz is working on that big case with the whole eternal darkness thing?”

“Oh yeah, the eternal darkness that’s spread over the whole dang neighborhood!”

“Yeah, I’m just helping them with that.”

Riz feels a strange fluttering in his chest at the switch in pronouns. Riz might not be non-binary—it’s not like their evidence supports that fact—but Gorgug is fully prepared to believe that they are anyway. Even though Riz has not presented _any_ coherent theories and their conspiracy boards are an absolute _mess_ , Gorgug believes in him with the simplest faith in the world: the kind of faith that kept Riz going during spring break. 

At some point during Riz’s internal crisis, Gorgug and Digby have stopped speaking aloud and are now mouthing words to each other from across the room. Riz thinks that they can read the word _condoms_ on Digby’s lips before Gorgug loudly says, “Thanks so much, Dad, sorry for waking you up! You better get back to sleep, big day in the workshop tomorrow!”

“All right!” Digby says agreeably. “You kids let me know if you need _anything,_ though. You know I’d rather you ask then—”

Gorgug gets up and closes the door.

“Sorry about that,” Gorgug says, throwing a condom that their dad had apparently palmed them onto the bedside table. They look at their torn and chewed mattress with a sigh. 

Riz spits out the piece of foam in his mouth. “Sorry.”

Gorgug shrugs. “It’s okay. I was going to make a new one anyway.”

“I can help,” Riz promises. “Since I, uh, ate this one.”

“Cool. We can do it tomorrow.”

Gorgug navigates the debris of their bed, clearing a space for themself to sit, and plucks one of the photos off of Riz’s ruined conspiracy board. It’s a photo of Riz’s dad, which had been nestled behind the alarmingly numerous photos of crustaceans on the board.

Now that Riz thinks about it, he might have gotten a bit carried away. 

“Your dad is on your gender board?” Gorgug asks. 

“Uh...yeah.”

“Did you ever talk to him about this stuff?”

“No,” Riz says. He sits down next to Gorgug, studying the photo in their hand. “I only started thinking about this stuff after I met him. I haven’t been back to heaven since spring break.”

“He seemed like a cool guy.”

“The _coolest._ I wanted to be just like him. I still want to be just like him,” Riz says, casting his glance upward even though his father wouldn’t be able to sense it. “It’s just...ugh, it’s dumb. I’m supposed to be the one Bad Kid who doesn’t have daddy issues.”

“Uh, nobody else thinks that. You avenged your dad’s death by eating his murderer.”

“And that should have resolved the issues!” Riz protests. “But meeting my dad, I realized that even though I wanted to be like him, he and I were also just…. _different_. He was a sexy spy and I like biting things. And he was okay with that; he was okay with me being different. And it...made me realize that I’d spent my whole life trying to be like him, but I’d never really thought about the ways I wanted to be _different_ from him.”

Gorgug lies down and rubs at their eyes again. They're clearly exhausted from the hour and from their earlier attempts to wrangle Riz, but they still nod attentively at Riz’s words. “Different like being non-binary.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Riz says. They flop down beside Gorgug. “Before me and my mom knew that Dad was in heaven, when it was just us in our dirty apartment, I was... _her guy,_ you know? I was all she had left of him. Her other guy had died, so I kind of...took it upon myself to... _be a guy._ But now I’ve met him, and he’s out there, and suddenly everything is confusing because I don’t have to _be the guy,_ but then what am I supposed to be?” Riz sighs. “Is that weird?”

“No,” Gorgug says. “I don’t think it’s weird. I guess I felt that way about my dad too. My biological dad, I mean. I never really thought about it until now...but I guess I was kind of like, well, if I’m not a son, he’s not going to be able to find me. But then I met him and it didn’t really matter as much.”

“Right?” Riz says excitedly. “That’s why I came to you! You’re confirming the evidence! We both have weird daddy gender issues—”

“Riz, I have a healthy relationship with both of my dads—”

“And if we both have daddy gender issues then that means I’m not just freaking out! I don’t have to do boy’s night or stealth mode or any of that! They can’t make you do stealth mode if you don’t have gender, right?”

“God, I hope so,” Gorgug says with a shudder. “Riz, if that was your only reason to be non-binary, that would be enough.”

“But it isn’t,” Riz says hurriedly, pointing to the conspiracy board. “Right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gorgug says, tossing the board off the bed. “You’re non-binary and you’re colorblind and you broke into my home at 2am, and it’s all fine.”

“Yeah,” Riz says with a relieved sigh. Their mind whirs as it catalogues Gorgug’s conclusions, and their limbs become heavy with long put-off exhaustion as they sit with the satisfaction of a mystery solved. “I get that. It’s nice to have the evidence though. It was all there—I just needed to run it by you. Thanks, Gorgug.”

Gorgug smiles. “You’re welcome? I’m not sure that I did that much. I still don’t really get the board...But it is nice to have another non-binary person in the group.”

“Well, it was nice not to have to do this alone,” Riz says. They reach for the abandoned stim toy and begin chewing absentmindedly. “Do you think Fabian will be upset that he’s the only bad boy left?”

“Fabian already worked through his masculinity crisis last year,” Gorgug says. They close their eyes and their voice lowers to a sleepy mumble. “We don’t need to be bad boys to be Bad Kids.”

“Yeah,” Riz says. “I believe in you.”

“I believe in you,” Gorgug repeats. They yawn. “What pronouns should we use for you?”

“I think...he and they. I think both? That makes sense, right?”

“You’re a guy-person-whatever,” Gorgug confirms.

“A guy-person-whatever,” Riz agrees. 

“Is there any more evidence you need to show me?"

“I...don’t think so. Not right now.”

“Okay,” Gorgug says with another enormous yawn. Their ruined bed creaks dangerously under their weight as they shift to lie on their side. “I’m going to sleep then. Night, Riz.”

“Night, Gorgug,” Riz says, smiling as Gorgug already begins to snore. 

Riz snuggles up against their side. They're fully aware that Gorgug’s parents will be ogling them tomorrow, but they're far too exhausted to care. His tattoos begin to hum faintly, and Riz rubs his chest, soothing the glowing words down until Gorgug’s room is dark once again. They’ve already solved one case today. The others can wait—at least until they’re done helping Gorgug fix the bed tomorrow morning. 


End file.
